For those who weren’t around, let me explain this phenomenon: The Merlin was to the Simon what the Nintendo was to the Atari 2600. This electronic memory-building toy was about the size of a brick and could play six games, including Tic-Tac-Toe and blackjack. It had red lights and made cool beeping sounds. It was the 1980 equivalent of the iPhone.

As I parent, I’ve found that a lot of older toys are just as good if not better than the new ones. My 4-year-old son plays with my old Legos and trucks in our basement for hours. And I have no doubt that my great-great-grandchildren will find just as much enjoyment with my Snoopy Sno-Cone machine as I did. But some toys just don’t stand the test of time. If I tried to hand my son a Merlin, he would smile politely and go find one of his LeapFrog toys. (Or, more accurately, he would start taking it apart and try turning it into an interstellar telephone.) But he definitely wouldn’t play it for more than six minutes. This is a kid who has access to the Skee-Ball app on my iPod Touch and Burnout Revenge on our Xbox 360. Can his short attention span even comprehend playing Tic-Tac-Toe against a computer?

Below is a list four more toys that I used to love that look totally boring now. Yours in the comments …

Simon: When Simon came out, and my friend Bryan got it, I remember it seemed like a state-of-the-art high-tech hocus pocus. “The colors light up. Randomly? How is that possible?!?” We would play Simon for hours, trying to replicate the sequence of flashing colors, fliching each time the dreaded buzzer told us we were wrong, and convinced we were having the time of our lives. That was 1979. In 2010, Simon looks like Rock Band without any of the fun parts.

This isn’t going to work …

Silly Putty: My son and I still have fun molding Silly Putty into sculptures and rolling it into a ball to test its bouncey properties. But as iPad owners are about to find out, the magical ability to pull images of comics off newspapers is close to useless in 2010. All Silly Putty will do is smudge your video screen. “But you work for a newspaper,” you say. Yes, I work for a newspaper that converted its presses to glossy new paper which made photos look 10 times better — but that ink also isn’t compatible with Silly Putty. (I’ve decided, after much thought, not to quit in protest.)

Cap guns: Kid-related weaponry was so much more lame during the Cold War. Cap guns and wimpy little squirt guns were gateway drugs to grabbing an actual BB gun and running off to the private grounds of Mercy College Preporatory High School to play war games with your friends. (Or was that just me?) Walk through Target these days, and not only are the toys guns safer, they’re also infinitely more awesome. I recently wrote about my conflicting desires to both remain an anti-gun household and arm my sons to the teeth with Nerf machine guns, rocket launchers and thermonuclear warheads. No room in that arsenal for a crappy little gun that makes a weak-ass “pop” noise then smells like the San Francisco Bay at low tide.

Mattel Electronics Football: A decade before John Madden put his name on what would become the top-selling video game franchise of all time, electronic football involved moving your little red rectangle past five other computer-controlled rectangles. There were no passing plays, time outs, blocking schemes, replays or statistics. And we still thought that this football game — and its baseball and basketball counterparts — were the coolest thing outside of a 10-minute Eddie Van Halen guitar solo. I hate to include this one on the list, because I used to love it so much. But I saw a replica at a Wal-Mart a few years ago, and played for about three minutes before I was bored to tears. Did I mention there were no pass plays?

PETER HARTLAUB is the pop culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and founder of this parenting blog, which admittedly sometimes has nothing to do with parenting. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/peterhartlaub.